The Business: Tabletop Losers Can Survive In Vidya

I mentioned earlier this week that Runequesthas a videogame adaptation coming. Here's the trailer.

Steam page is here.

As Call of Cthulhu successfully made the medium jump years ago. Pathfinder has some well-regarded videogames. Paranoia has a game, and we all know that BattleTech (as "MechWarrior") has been in Vidya for decades. R. Talsorian used Cyberpunk for a videogame and single-handedly overturned decades of being the also-ran of cyberpunk gaming, going from Also-Ran to Winner.

More Tabletop losers need to go this route if they want to stay in the commercial end of things.

Legend of the Five Rings? Shadowfist? Ars Magica? All those Theater Kid products? All of them would do far better as videogame products than in tabletop, and videogame publishers are always on the lookout for new IP to exploit. It's long past time for most of the people wasting time and money in Tabletop to give up, go to Vidya, and make something that would actually get played.

And you'd actually make a real living by doing so. Just ask Warren Spector, Ree Soesbee, or Scott Harring.

Leave Tabletop to The Only Game(s) That Matter and the non-commercial hobbyists because there's no more fortunes to be had here for anyone else. That's why you have to beg on Kickstarter.

The Culture: The Cyberstein Post-Mortem Show

Last night was another appearance on This Is Dunder Moose, this time talking Cyberpunk 2020.

All of us had our pieces of the overall puzzle and it takes a panel discussion like this to put them together in a format friendly to outside observers, especially those that are curious about Braunstein but has not gone for it themselves.

Through podcast episodes like this, you too can see how incredible Braunstein is as a tool--a missing part of the overall machine of gameplay--and with nothing more than a meme and a dream just one player can kick off months or years of gaming excitement as I (and a few others) did this time around.

I want to point out that our Referee for this, Dorrinal, made clear that it was the release of BROZER that got him to finish up his scenario and take the plunge into running one himself. Get it (it's free in PDF), read it, comprehend it, and them implement it.

The stereotype--shared with Shadowrun--is that everyone cybers to the gills (sans magic-users in SR). That was not true; my man had no cyberware, no high-powered gadgets, and no combat ability at all. Yet there he was, making things happen, influencing if not directing the flow of events; were he more established in Night City, he would have made up some work for others to take on.

The other stereotype is that everyone effective has some bullshit IWIN card. That also was not true; my man did nothing that his real world counterparts have not done, and a lot of the things I did as Tomino were things I witnessed first-hand, heard at one remove, or read about in a history book somewhere. In this instance, it was maintaining a strict segregation between Public and Private such that Tomino did nothing sketchy on his personal devices. Deniability is paramount as a Corporate, and maintaining it is itself a Best Practice. Sketchy shit happened privately.

You can do this too. Find the game that you want to play, then do Braunstein with it. Memes and dreams- you can use the latter to make the former real, or you can stay in the Soup Aisle.

The Culture: The Other Braunstein-Capable Game From Maximum Mike

R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk series are the most playable products out of the box. They are not the only real games; there is one other.

The problem? You need at least two books (this and Mekton Zeta Plus), you should have the Screen too, and then there's Some Assembly Required.

But, once you've had that BattleTech-style build party phase where everyone gets together and puts down some sick mecha/ship/whatever designs, you still have the same Interlock System as you do in a Cyberpunk game (2020 is the best fit) so you can have that same swift tactical action.

What you may end up feeling to be lacking is at the strategic scale, as logistics tends to be handwaved and thus the basis for politics is also depreciated, but given when MZ (and its predecessors) came out--Peak Cargo Cult Memory Holing--this is forgivable on grounds of ignorance. You may be able to tease out something within the rules that works, but don't feel too bad if you don't.

What I said about certain Roles in Cyberpunk applies to MZ and its Mecha Anime sources: in order to get your Ghirens Zabis the weight that they ought to have on a campaign, you need to have a play structure that allows for that to be seen and done by the players. Braunstein sessions, strict timekeeping, and the other stuff that the Bros recovered from the Memory Hole to reconstruct the real and true Tabletop Adventure Game hobby and medium are required to make that happen and work as intended.

Faction Play and its strategic emphasis rewards Corporates, Fixers, Medias, Rockerboys, and others who exist on that level of economic and social conflict. Scenario Play and its tactical emphasis rewards Solos, Netrunners, (Med)Techs, and Cops. Nomads are sufficiently flexible to easily shift between the two, provided that their native social environment is able to make itself felt.

That sort of thing transfers over to a MZ game, but as MZ doesn't have Roles it's more about general archetypes. The senior officers, high officials, corporate officers, party leaders, etc. work on the Faction level primarily. The mecha jocks, PA grunts, fighter aces, spies and spec ops, etc. are more on the Scenario and tactical end. Depending on the specifics, some others can shift between them with ease; the Idol Singer Girlfriend in a Macross (or inspired) campaign can easily do that, and we see in Frontier and Delta that this bears out, and that's the most obvious example.

I'm in no position to act on this now--it's a (very, very, very) long shot, but I DID ask to be considered for US Ambassador to the Holy See because THERE IS NO ONE THERE (Dude, WTF?)--but if you want to give another R. Tal game a go this is the one to go with.

("But what about the Women's Division?" you ask. Point them to Teenagers From Outer Space. Wacky '80 romcom shit. Go nuts.)

The Culture: Pop Cult Orthdoxy Is Not For Corporations To Decide

Author Brian Niemeier wrote, some years ago now, about corporate fandom and dubbed it "The Pop Cult".

This is the key element he identified then:

"...the PopCult doesn’t offer any answers. It’s pure escapism. The problem is it’s an escape from self-mastery and virtue into the clutches of soulless megacorporations."

Since then what we've seen is that the members of the Pop Cult are not so easily herded. Psuedo-religions are still religions, and as such the Faithful can and do reject the direction of the leadership if they (a) detect that the leaders are going where they ought not go and (b) they sense that there is a critical mass that agrees on (a).

This leads to the question: "Who decides what is Canon?" It was presumed that the Pop Cultist would slavish conform to whatever their idols told them. This turned out to be not true. What Is or Is Not in Canon, once the Creator is gone, is for the Audience to decide: not the Corporation.

Why? This is why.

So a friend did some digging and apparently Alan Merrett, the guy upheld as the source of "female Space Marines used to be canon," is a pathological liar who was disliked by his coworkers and helped Games Workshop make some of it's worst business decisions. pic.twitter.com/xptfrXJsgr

— Marshal Bohemond ⚔️⛨ Space Crusader Vtuber (@HMBohemond) October 12, 2024

Good stewards recognize this fact. That is why they are scrupulous about the property that they sheppard, especially if their compensation is directly tied to its long-term health (and thus value).

We see this being the case (most of the time; there have been mistakes) with the Howard and Burroughs Estates. It was the case for Tolkien until Christopher died and the new stewards did some truly Boomer-style things to what their ((great-?)grandfather created.

One need look only at Lucasfilm, Marvel, and D.C. to see what happens when good stewards are not in place.

"But how can the audience make those decisions?"

Force of numbers. In addition to SpaceMace 39K, Mouse Wars, BattleTech, and many others under incompetent or traitorous management are increasingly cut out of the culture by the audience.

Or do you think that corporate seething at user-driven online publishing isn't just about Mainstream News losing their Narrative monopoly? No, far more important for day-to-day living is that those same platforms allow the audiences of various properties to completely cut out corrupt and incompetent corporate management from the conversation and thus push them out of what is and is not in the canon. No amount of Official Pronouncements means jack shit without buy-in.

Proof? Sorcerers By The Sea outright bribed a cohort of YouTube channels to shill for Corporate Positions because they had considerable audiences, were rather effective and efficient at it, and could be bought with the pocket change usually reserved for tipping the pizza delivery guy.

Why? Well, you get things like this out of them and this is far more effective at determine what Is and Is Not than what they say or do.

I can go on.

The corporate stewards that seethe over this are, at best, Mammon Mobsters mad that the audience will not mindless Consume Product and then get excited for Next Product. You see this most with Stupid British Toy Company and the Devil Mouse.

But the ones that hate it most are the Death Cultists that serve Molech, and as their entire apparantus for taking the openings made by Mammon Mobsters acting as 5th Columnists to turn the corporate operations into recruitment funnels into the Death Cult. As these corporate actors (unlike those in more important segments of the economy) do not have the ability to just use State power to silence these dissidents they have to compete using personal connections with Fellow Travelers in either those platforms or related ones (like Stripe or Patreon) to do it instead, and in the meantime find or build up a compliant group of shills spouting the party line.

They have to do this, because otherise their attempts at being sly about their Death Cult pozzing will keep getting exposed and thereby rendered impotent.

Oh, and that includes their attempts to regain their previous cloak of invisibily via BRIDGE.

This is what corporates and propagandists don't get: the audience gets not only a say, but the final say.

That audience? VETO! VETO! VETO!

And those attempts to pozz non-Anglo media? Already meeting even heavier resistance than the Western pushes ever got. No blackpilling folks. This can be beaten.

Especially once you account for audience use of Print On Demand technology to keep what is considered Orthodox available. We just want our Hunchbacks, and we'll have them the way they must be one way or another.

The Culture: The Bros Continue To Show That Braunstein Is The Way

One of the hosts of Geek Gab, Dorrinal, has decided that he too wants to run a Braunstein.

His game to run? Let's say that you've definitely heard of it.

(It could be another edition, but 2020 is still the best one available. Sorry Red fans.)

Which means that there is instant recognition that the other game you probably heard of would work very well.

Yes, I prefer 1st or 2nd Edition.

The crazy thing is that, when you get down to it, this will end up looking a lot like Fluid's recent Gangbusters game only with way more factions in the mix both sides of the law. You just have a different set of tropes and trappings to play with.

It will also, I think, solve a lot of long-standing problems with the games such as having your hacker characters playing a completely separate game from everyone else becauuse (surprise, surprise) you can actually handle the hacks away from the table. Same with doing legwork, getting medical work done, sourcing supplies, recruiting muscle, etc. because all of that can be handled as Orders to the Referee or played out directly player-to-player with the Referee being informed of the results to report to everyone else.

Which means that what goes on at the table is the run itself. All that other stuff? Players diffusing into separate angles that then converge back on the run when it goes down, and we see who got the drop upon whom and thus which runner(s) come out on top and which get toasted and left face-down in a ditch.

Good luck, runners. You'll need it.

The Culture: Videogames Superseded Tabletop For Conventional Play By 1980

Do you want to know why I keep harping on Conventional Play being surpassed and superceded by videogames?

What do they go on about? "Muh Narrative" (read a fucking book, and not the wizard book) and "Muh One True PC/Party".

That got solved by 1980.

This is where "Rogue-like" came from.

The following year, Conventional Play had its first Muh Narrative videogame.

Which would soon have others joining the party over the 1980s.

SSI's Phantasie would join that list by the end of the decade alongside the officially-licensed Gold Box AD&D games.

Now add in the Japanese games such as the long-running Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series, then arcade games for more fast-paced versions, and it becomes very easy to see why those not already involved in the tabletop hobby by 1990 presumed that "RPG" meant "videogame genre".

Yes, 2nd Edition. Yes, Palladium. I was there; I remember.

And I recall that getting anyone to play any tabletop game at all who was not a Gross Nerd was like pulling teeth, and then it was 2nd Edition, The Anne Rice Game, or Uncle Kevin's Kitchen Sink Non-Game (which still has the best wholly unintentional tie-in movie adaptation).

They were right to refuse, and not just because of who did the pitching.

They didn't have to round up a bunch of people to play. They didn't have to put up with bad behavior. They didn't even have to worry about purchase prices because by 1990 we started to see rentals be a thing.

They had a better Conventional Play experience before Ronald Reagan left the White House.

You had something closer to the real game with folks playing Car Wars, BattleTech, and SpaceMace 39K.

Meanwhile, people now going on about how they were playing the real game all this time were deep into Not Teaching Hobbyists What They (Claim To) Know like the Boomers they are.

And folks wonder why I say Conventional Play in Tabletop is screwed.

The fight got lost nearly 45 years ago. It's been nothing but a long, slow defeat ever since.

Why should I stick with a losing proposition when videogame alternatives are 100% superior and the real game gives me all I ever wanted from this hobby. Tabletop Conventional Play has never delivered, and it cannot deliver, so I welcome its demise in Tabletop.

And you can take your wretched "industry" with you.

The Culture: The Need For A Forever Edition

The Recognition of the Need

One of the things I noticed with the serious exploration of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition is that having a single, settled, static edition of the game turned out to be a massive benefit to attracting and retaining new people.

Having a ruleset that does not change because it is not subject to commercial considerations is a massive boon to any hobby campaign built upon that cornerstone foundation. This is confirmed by how Car Wars and BattleTech endured for so long despite neglect or even hostility by the controlling Publisher; the rules manuals could be had online, and before that the used market, that remained as they were since publication as well as less-than-legal sources (photocopying and mimeographing).

Therefore the conclusion is obvious: a stable, healthy hobby scene cannot be subjected to Edition Churn. It must use one unbending, unyielding, unchanging Forever Edition such that someone learning the game today learns exactly the same rules to play exactly the same game as someone a thousand years from now.

Yes, this means that Product Development is going to completely change. Good.

The End of The Consumer Product Cycle

Rules are not shoes. Rules are not cars. They are not goods to be used, worn out, and discarded when no longer fit for purpose.

Rules are like software, in that it is a pile of mechanics and procedures that operate like a machine. They are better than software in that you do not need electricity or a computer to use it.

That means two things: it is possible to hit "good enough" during development, and it is viable to aim for "perfect" as the end goal of development. The former term is self-explanatory; the latter merits qualification, so here it is: "Perfect" is defined as having achieved a state where any further changes can only damage the ability of the rules to achieve the stated outcome to be had by playing the game.

"Good enough" is where development starts. "Perfect" is where it ends. The transition between the two is what development is: the refining from a rough, but usable concept into the final finished product that does what it is meant to do- no more, no less.

That this is at odds with what is considered Best Practices for commercial operation, be it in physical or in digital products, should not be a surprise to anyone. Edition Churn is a commercial practice that is at odds with the fostering of a healthy hobby environment, and it has been known as such since Stupid British Toy Company deliberately weaponized it as a business practice in the 1980s.

This practice needs to be taken into the town square, strung up at the gallows, and hanged for all to see before being doused in jet fuel and lit up to burn to ash.

There is one very obvious reason for why this needs to die: it is no longer necessary to do this at all.

The technology now exists for a rules manual to be posted online for all to see, and to study, at their leisure. It's been around for over 30 years at this point; there is no need for anyone to churn editions anymore for any form of tabletop game of any kind. Put the rules online; mirror that site, make PDFs available for offline use, and sell Print On Demand copies at-cost.

Once the rules have achieved their final form, lock the site down as well as its mirrors. Do similarly for the PDFs and POD listings.

Now you have that game that shall be the same for the rest of time. Good.

But Why?

To kill the threat that Muh Officialdum, almost always fostered as a headscrew by Publishers to weaponize Fear Of Missing Out to induce a cult-like dependency upon the Publisher via control over the Brand, has upon a hobby.

If a rulebook from 10 A.D. and a rulebook from 3010 A.D. are exactly the same, then the Hobbyists will be able to enjoy the game for generations on end without any worry that some dangerhair dumbass, some status-striving slut, some grifting guru, some poncy politico, etc. will seize control over the game via legal fuckery and shit-can the game and its Brand.

Keeping cultural institutions out of the hands of obvious attack vectors for bad actors is part-and-parcel of good stewardship over one's culture. That includes games, especially those who have a habit of teaching people ideas and practices that some folks would rather not spread around.

The Business: Operational Tempo & Proper Campaign Play

There's something else that needs to be kept in mind when we talk about how Vidya beats Tabletop for a lot of adventure game stuff.

Vidya, for certain games so far, does a far better job realizing how a man in that environment has to think and act to succeed than on Tabletop. The game that illustrates this best is BattleTech. Both the Harebrained Schemes adaptation and the Pirahna Games one handle all of the actual campaign stuff better than tabletop because it's shoved into the faces of the typical player; you have to master logistics to win the game.

Streamer commentary makes the experience so much better.

Notice that both of these games have their own ways of doing Conventional Play's disregard of Strict Timekeeping because both of these are single-player games with no pressure upon them by hostile actors; they are both games with Narrative at their core, so you have to trip Plot Triggers for things to happen that matter- just like Conventional Play.

When you go to an Open World mode of play (which both of these videos do), even that is gone. You can do all the refits, train up pilots, go wherever, and the only costs that matter are time and (sometimes) availability. Yes, this is exactly same thing as the old joke about JRPGs where you have to Save The World Right Now, but you spent as much or more time doing sidequests than the main quest because that's where much or most of the game is.

As JD Sauvage said on Twitter the other day, Operational Tempo matters. Conventional Play does not have this. It cannot because it is taken as Referee cheating players, and due to several infamous episodes that got turned into comic strips and running jokes there is substance to that seeming.

Pressure comes from outside the player. Want your man to get that loot in the dungeon? Got to get down there and grab it before some other man does, and that someone else is run by a player- not a NPC run by the Referee.

That player can be you, as you may be forced to bench your first choice man due to what goes down at the table and have to resort to a backup choice to secure that bag instead. (Get used to the idea of having a roster of mans when you play in a real campaign, rotating them on and off the bench as required.)

That player can also be someone else, whom you do not know, and you will not know until that treasure is taken or otherwise removed from the campaign and thus no longer relevant.

That's how things really work when you play a real tabletop adventure game, and you play it in a proper campaign environment. It will not feel like a Narrative; it is not play-acting. It will feel like war, like business- like the competition that it is. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose- and sometimes you win or lose for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

And the experience is vital to achieving the full power of the tbletop adventure game as a medium.

My Life As A Gamer: Using An '80s Action Game In Current Year

You don't hear this talked about a lot, but there is one reason for why--outside of Horror--you don't see successful comteporary adventure games that lack some superpower element is because Things Change Over Time.

Palladium has Ninjas & Superspies, TSR had Top Secret, AEG has Spycraft, GDW had Twilight 2000, and there's been others in this mode over the years. All of them ground themselves in what was Here And Now at the time, and they are intended to be some form of Action Adventure Game.

Because they are meant to be set Here And Now, that opens the game to be vulnerable to the changes in technology, culture, standards, and practices over time. Handling that means adding to the game. This is easier and harder than it seems.

It's Easier

You don't need to wait on someone to publish product for the game.

You can just look up product maker websites directly. You can use Google Maps (etc.) to scout locations. The Chans, Kiwifarms, etc. are good places to lurk (and fucking lurk, not post) for those dealing in Weird Shit in their games. YouTube (etc.) has plenty of intro-level videos on topics across the board, so if you want to throw together your own Mission: Impossible thing (which is what Spycraft is for) then you can directly consult source material for everything.

Glamorous villa location for your players to trash in a firefight? Plenty of Real Estate search sites (and channels) to look at to find the right one in the right place, which you can then geo-locate via Google Maps and figure out travel times (and passage fees).

Going to do Action Movie Action sufficient to ressurect Cannon Films? Every firearms manufacturer and accessory manufacturer is online, and getting current pricing isn't that hard either. The same applies to cars, trucks, motorcycles, boats, planes (yes, including yachts and private jets). Yes, including the Bespoke sort that have six or seven figure pricetags (or more) and are in batches of a score or less.

Clothes? You got it all online. Bespoke stuff. Off the rack. Clearance. And in many cases your players' mans can order them online and have them shipped to whatever address they provide. Price quotes? Check. Shipping times? Check.

Hotels? You can check them online in real time. Weather conditions and forecats are online. The basics of security procedures (enough to extraopolate from there) are extensively documented.

And almost all of it is out in the open.

It has never been easier to just put the real stuff into the game. But-

It's Harder

When it's time to put the mechanics into action that's when your System Mastery shows itself. Your man has the latest iPhone. Can he use it Hack The Gibson and bypass the electronic security controls?

Or, more likely, can your man crack a card reader to skim the user data of those swiping their cards (or tapping their phones) and use it to get past whatever.

Your man's pistol uses 5.7 ammunition. What, in mechanical terms, are its performance characteristics? (Yes, this means "XdY damage" is not sufficient.) What Rate of Fire can he achieve, given how the game's combat systems work? (Remember, you're talking about a setting where people, in earnest, still use firearms from the 19th century in combat; this matters.)

That late model Ford F-150 has no remote kill switch, right? Your man isn't moving around sufficient funds to trigger automatic reporting, is he? (There are multiple ways for this to happen.) He hasn't been kicked off Stripe, has he? Had his bank accounts closed, like what happened to Nigel Farage? And does he realize that his iPhone is a snitchbrick that always reveals his location via GPS, and has fireware-level backdoors into its microphone and camera?

Those are all things that need to be sorted out in terms of mechanics and procedures, which means that you need to translate Real Life to Game World terms.

That, by the way, is what a lot of apologists for Conventional Play use as a fallback position to justify the Conventional Play model of the supplement treadmill- of pushing reams of product. "You're paying him to do that for you" they say, only that they don't and they just half-ass it.

So Which Is It?

If you know how to approach it, it's easier. That requires having a solid game product with clear technical documentation as to what the rules are, how they work, and why; you will also have a bitch of a time finding that product because they're buried under blizzards of bullshit.

With that in hand, figuring out how to use Current Day things in game terms becomes trivial; you have a rubric, you use it, it works, and Bob's your Uncle.

Without it, you're making (at best, informed) wild-assed guesses and tinkering your way to something that passes for playable in a dark alley at midnight- like how Bizzaro passes for Superman under poor lighting. That gets tiresome fast for most people, and wears even the most dedicated (or austistic) hobbyist down over time.

And now you see why it's usually Horror that remains popular, because so much of this hassle does not apply.

A Note On Genre Dominance

Because of all this variability over time, contemporary settings are dynamic to the point of distraction and undesirability for most people. Things that Work This Way in reality don't in the game because the game's rules are pisspoor and can't address the situation properly.

Fantastic otherworldly adventure games don't have this problem because they are static. A sword is a sword is a sword, and the differences between types is easily handled as AD&D1e proved conclusively over 40 years ago. Such settings, because they are easier to handle and run, have far greater appeal to Normies and Hobbyists alike as a direct result of this fact- and it also explains why anything smacking of Modernity in terms of technology is steadfastly refused and gatekept out.

You'll also see that the mass popularity of any given fantastic futuristic setting also showcases this static quality- e.g. Uncle George's Space Opera. A lot of the grumbling, bickering, and complaining comes about because this stasis is broken somehow (e.g. the Clans in BattleTech) and the response as a result is a fracturing of the user base. For a product category wholly dependent upon Network Effects, this is incompetence in action- you are Fucking With The Money.

This, by the by, validates my position that Official Settings should just tell the backstory and then stop- as Harn does. Never advance the timeline because that's the players' job.

The Culture: Yes, The Big Two Cyberpunk Games Are Wargames At Their Roots Also

The two cyberpunk tabletop RPGs that matter are Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. Both are brainchilds of the late 1980s that didn't truly break into popularity (compared to the all-mighty AD&D) until their early-'90s second editions.

Both of them, therefore, are capable of being run as wargames in the usual Braunstein model and you can go full Kriegspiel campaigning with them. The reason that this didn't happen is because neither publisher made it obvious where that level of play was going to fall, despite it being in the face of users from the start: the very parties that hire the street-tier adventurers who do the dirty work for dirty money.